Putin’s Real Worry About Trump’s Venezuela Intervention

Stephen Sestanovich is the George F. Kennan senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

How do Russian policymakers view President Donald Trump’s military action against Venezuela? Since U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro and his wife, much analysis—in both Russia and the West—has weighed the balance between obvious short-term costs and possible long-term benefits.

For Russian President Vladimir Putin two bigger—but less mentioned—questions, to which he does not yet have answers, are these: whether Trump aims to lower global oil prices and whether U.S. pressure on Russia’s “shadow fleet,” which handles Russian oil exports, will trigger a bigger change in policy toward Ukraine.

Potential Pluses for Moscow

“We couldn’t ask for anything better,” Fyodor Lukyanov, a major Russian commentator, wrote after the Caracas raid. He and others have pointed to Moscow’s new opportunities in an unfolding global debate about the principles of international order:

• A U.S. attack on a neighboring state gives Russia a chance to relocate itself, however hypocritically, in the diplomatic mainstream, as a defender of sovereignty and international law.
• The Trump administration’s emphasis on preserving a U.S. sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere could also seem to validate Russia’s claims for a similar sphere in its own neighborhood. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has put it this way: Washington no longer has anything to “reproach our country for.”
• The attack on Caracas has yielded progress toward yet another Russian goal—division between the United States and its NATO allies, who have expressed alarm at the growing reach (most dramatically, in Greenland) of Trump’s sphere-of-influence claims.

Likely Minuses

Alongside these (largely intangible) political gains are multiple downsides for Moscow, most of them economic. Such costs are more concrete and quantifiable than the benefits; most of them will be difficult to avoid:

• Russian investments in Venezuela’s oil industry over the last twenty years will now have to be, formally or informally, written off. 
• Past loans for Venezuela’s purchase of Russian weapons face the same fate—and the overall market appeal of such arms has clearly been diminished. Fair or not, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s taunt seemed to hit the mark: “[They] didn’t work so well, did they?”
• Trade between Russia and Venezuela, though small (perhaps $2 to $3 billion annually), could cease altogether, as will discounted Venezuelan energy supplies to other countries of the region—above all, Cuba—that Russia has long cultivated.

What Putin Really Wants to Know

 All these costs and benefits—short- and long-term, political and economic, concrete and intangible—have their place in Russia’s calculus. So does their link to Putin’s rhetorical emphasis on building a “Global Majority” to challenge Washington. (Maduro had been part of that effort, coming to Moscow last spring to sign a “strategic partnership” agreement.) 

Yet none of these results of Trump’s Caracas operation will matter as much for Russian strategy as two others that are rarely mentioned:

• Effect on U.S. Energy Aims. Will Trump’s claim that the United States will “run” Venezuela start a campaign to bring down global oil prices? Washington policymakers have hinted at—but not yet articulated—this goal. At a time when international markets are already softening, a significant drop in energy export revenues would be far more significant for Putin than either the multilateral diplomatic gains or the bilateral economic costs described above. Already, some Russian oil is reportedly selling for as little as $35 per barrel. An across-the-board decline would be one piece of very bad post-Caracas news for Putin.
• The Effect on U.S. Ukraine Policy.  Russian policymakers could be frustrated by some elements of Trump’s effort to end the war in Ukraine, but overall Washington has not put significant new pressure on Moscow. That would change if U.S. seizures of Russian tankers moving in and out of Venezuela start to morph into real activism against the large “shadow fleet.” More ominous still would be a broader reconsolidation of Western unity in support of Ukraine. Trump’s seizure of Maduro has coincided with new warnings aimed at Moscow—“I’m not thrilled with Putin,” the U.S. president recently said. Russia’s leader has to worry that this link will harden and that Venezuela-related actions against Russian shipping will begin to affect the war itself, the one undertaking that matters to him most.

A more ambitious U.S. assault on oil prices and a heightened pressure campaign to support Ukraine could still be low-probability outcomes of Washington’s actions in Venezuela. Yet no other results would have remotely comparable meaning for Putin. He has to be watching them closely. 

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.